The "Odyssey" sliced through the sky of Sector Gamma, a silent, black arrowhead moving with incredible speed. Inside, the mood was tense and quiet.
They were flying towards the angry red blotch on their map, the festering wound in reality created by the Schism Monolith. From her command chair on the bridge, Emma Thorne's voice was a calm, steady presence in their comms.
"We are approaching the corrupted zone," she announced. "The ship's reality anchor is holding, but I'm detecting heavy chaotic energy distortions ahead. It's going to get bumpy."
She wasn't kidding. As they crossed the invisible border into the Monolith's area of influence, the view on the main screen began to warp and glitch.
The normal, rocky landscape below twisted into a nightmare. The ground was covered in a pulsating, black moss that seemed to crawl and breathe.
